Pocket Scale

I punch in a keycode and enter the office. Three steps through the door I swipe my travelcard against an old wooden box, which starts spitting out a radio station based on forty million people’s answer to the question ‘What songs would a Joy Division fan like?’ The sexyfuture arrived yesterday, and it colonised my pockets.

Even on the days you leave your phone at home, you carry enough hacked objects to unlock space and time, provided you find the right door. What should we be thinking about as we bring our products to life? What are we strapping to our keyrings? And what does all of this mean for a scale we’ve been familiar with for centuries?

Matthew will empty his pockets live at dConstruct to find out, revealing the five things he’s carrying around with him in Brighton and why.

Writer and editor Matthew Sheret is Last.fm’s Data Griot, using everything from tweets to radio scripts to tell stories about Last.fm’s numbers.

He has worked for the likes of Newspaper Club, 4iP, Thomson Reuters and Dentsu London and in 2008 co-founded We Are Words Pictures, an ad-hoc team of comic book creators who promote the work of up-and-coming creators.

In his spare time he edits and publishes the anthology Paper Science and plays with Lego.